Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Another year in the can. Great year personnally, sucky yearprofessionally, double sucky based on world events.

Idiots outside are shooting off fireworks in a cold drizzle. It's notquite cold enough to snow, but it's gotta be really close. Most of thefireworks are plain old firecrackers, but some are m-80's or cherrybombs, and the smart-asses are putting them in communal trash cansat the end of the street. They've been doing that intermittently for 2weeks, with a single bam scaring me every other night. Now it soundslike a world war 1 artillery duel. tiring.

Monday, December 29, 2008

Scary new article on Watt's up with that from a gentleman namedDon Easterbrook. The article is writtenby the same scientist that predicted global cooling back in 1998.This is what the agw modelers should be doing, making predictionsthat are then confirmed by data. If a prediction based on a theory is confirmed by datathat might mean the theory is true. Currently, global warmingis changing to 'global climate change because the data doesn't fitthe theory.

If another theory is proven by data; such as climate runs in cyclesthat are mostly driven by the earth's orbit and the sun's varying outputthat can be most easily measured by the number of sunspots over time,then AGW is pretty much disproven.

It might be true that adding carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can warmthings up slightly, maybe 1 degree over 100 years, but that is just noisecompared to the signal that is imposed by the sun.

Here's another chart from wikipedia with an explanationthat seems to knock the idea of the sun having no influenceon global warming on the head:

On longer time scales, the sun has shown considerable variability, including the long Maunder Minimum when almost no sunspots were observed, the less severe Dalton Minimum, and increased sunspot activity during the last fifty years, known as the Modern Maximum. The causes for these variations are not well understood, but because sunspots and associated faculae affect the brightness of the sun, solar luminosity is lower during periods of low sunspot activity. It is widely believed that the low solar activity during the Maunder Minimum and earlier periods may be among the principal causes of the Little Ice Age. Similarly, the Modern Maximum is partly responsible for global warming, especially the temperature increases between 1900 and 1950. One study (Stott et al. 2003), argues that residual warming due to the sustained high level of activity since 1950 is responsible for 16 to 36% of recent warming.

I can't say for sure what is going to happen with the climate, it mightbe warmer or colder, but the AGW crowd seems to say that earth's climatewill change and that will confirm their theory so we need to put a large dentin productivity and especially in the United States we should all move into largeapartment blocks and sweat in the heat. On the other hand, Don Easterbrook ismaking a prediction that the sun will have fewer spots and it is going to be colderover the next thirty years then the previous thirty years.

If I were designing two experiments and presenting them in an undergraduateengineering lab, I'd get laughed off of the podium if I presented AGW. It's nottestable, the only way to see results is wait 100 years or make models that don'tmatch any data. The global cooling theory is a great experiment, you can do itwith cheap equipment, just a telescope, a thermometer and a notebook and it will givea yes or no answer within3 years. Are we back on the normal sunspot cycle yesor no? If no, then put a stop to trading carbon credits and other nonsense and focuson what is important, energy security for the USA and for the people of the world.

On Don Easterbrook's website he has a great presentation that explains why co2didn't cause temperature changes up to 1945, so it's unlikely that it is changing theclimate now.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Fabius Maximus has a standard good post on the current financialcrisis with a summary of what could happen going forward:

The new world brought another period of peace and prosperity, perhaps the greatest 5 decades the world has ever seen. Now the two superpowers of that era both have uncertain futures. The world sinks into a severe recession. Beyond that new challenges await.

Peak Oil

Climate change

The shift of power from west to east

The second demographic transition, aging populations and perhaps extinction for some major cultures.

Perhaps the new world will be even better than we can dream. It’s up to us.

A commenter there leaps on the climate change item. Fabius leaps back:

Fabius Maximus replies: The climate has never been static, but the changes have often been bad news. Like the little ice age. I suggest you study that period, as there are tentative indications we may be entering another cooling cycle. Not necessarily as long or cold, but even a few years of cold would be unpleasant with world grain inventories (per capita, or days demand) at 50-year lows.

He makes a good point. I might be a an "AGW denier", but I do worry aboutclimate change. Here in Italy it's much colder than I'm used to and it makesme see that without heat it would be pretty hard to live through the winter.If it is several degrees colder it would be much worse, going from 3 degrees abovefreezing to zero would mean snow every day instead of just rain every day.

If it is just warmer then things might suck, we might be sitting under ceilingfans stirring barely moving air as we sweat like a scene from In the Heat of theNight, but we won't die. We need to be spending money to mitigate current problemsnow, and not wasting trillions to prevent a potential one or two degreestemperature rise in 100 years. Problems #1 is my real worry.If we have energy, we can survive heat or cold. If we don't have energy, theninstead of surfing the internet while watching my new 40" LCD I'd be inbed with 2 comforters on top of me.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/flow_charts.png

Thursday, December 11, 2008

This video is required watching. Whether or not AGW is real andtemperatures are increasing, this approach from Bjorn Lomberg willgive better results. Rather than spending billions to try and mitigateglobal warming to little (or I think no) effect, we can spend billions ofdollars and fix real problems that are killing people or making themneedlessly unhealthy today.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Ace links to excerpts from a report on the senate website (I connected viainterweb pipes) where 650 earth scientists are saying they are globalwarming skeptics. I'm a skeptic too, but as a paid minion of the oil industrythat's part of my job. These guys have day jobs as scientists so believethem (hypnotic voice on) believe them, believe them, it's getting colder,(hypnotic voice off)

here's my favorite quote:

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

There are better quotes, but that gentleman complains about non-geologists winning the nobel,as a geologist.

I'm skeptical because I look at squiggly lines all day as part of my job. The hocky stick was aa couple of straight lines made up of all different kinds of data, ice cores, tree rings, thermometersand satellite data. It's hard enough putting together data that was all acquired the same week,but splicing a bunch of crep together that doesn't match known historical data points like themedieval warming period told me its a bunch of spliced crep.

There are more priorities that we should be worrying about now, apart from all the financialdisasters we should be trying to get energy independence for the usa, using whatever technologyis available from drill drill drill to nukes. peak oil is the approaching really big problem, even ifprices go to $8 next month, it won't change how much oil is in the ground. Once the oil runs out wesee what real poverty looks like.

[I'm not sure how to do it, but I'd start with an import tax on oil. If the us energy industry isn'tprotected we'll see that most of the alternative energy industry will be destroyed at the same time.Better to keep prices somewhat high, $50/bbl, and keep pushing ahead to energy independanceand not use cheap oil to keep suckling at the tit of the foreign oil industry.]

Saturday, December 06, 2008

I'm back in Italy and I'm having a lot of trouble with jetlag this trip.I screwed up and slept a couple of hours thursday afternoon when Iarrived, then I couldn't sleep again until 6 am friday. I was guilty ofasleep at the office all day friday, luckily nothing of importance happenedand I safely made it home without getting myself run off. The really stupidthing I did was I repeated the mistake last night too, then slept until 1 pm.

Now it's midnight on saturday night and I couldn't be more awake, I'mstuck watching my crappy sky tv satellite. It's in black and white becausewe have an ntsc tv and the analog signal is pal, I switched out the box foran hd box thinking that hdmi should be the same all around the world, butall I get is the top half of the screen, so I'm sticking with the analog signalin black and white. 1000 channels of mostly nothing, with lots of historychannels and nat geo channels, but they are all repeating the same showsfrom earlier in the evening. Sadly the only thing on that's interesting arethe dial-a-porn channels, where a model answers the phone and graduallytakes off her clothes. (I'm learning italian, I have to watch)

I can't imagine how they make money unless the guys calling are paying $100per minute, because they are almost never talking on the phone. Oh well,you know you're bored when you're drinking italian new wine out of a 3 literplastic jug watching italian porno in black and white, and the most interestingthing to think of is their business plan.

Better than thinking of my business plan. Lou Minatti mentioned in a blogpost that oilfield service companies in houston are about to do big layoffsaccording to a high placed relative of his. I understand why that will haveto happen to some extant, the big question will be will they cut to get aheadof the problem to maintain or increase profitability, or will they just lop offthe bottom 10%. hmmm.

In 1991 they fired almost everyone (90% of staff) because the businessdied when prices crashed back to $8/barrel, but they layoffs happenedin stages. In smaller downward dips like 1994, 1996 and 2007 they justlayed off the bottom 10%. In 1998 they tried a different tack and layedoff everyone above a certain seniority who weren't on a management track,which in one way was more shocking than laying off everyone slowly, becausethe guys you'd think would never leave were gone in a blink. Almost all gothired back pretty quickly as contractors when it picked up again a couple monthslater, but it was still a weird higher management decision that I hope theydon't repeat.

It all depends on demand, if demand drops too much too fast until all storageand all tankers are full, it will go to $10 and all drilling not on deepwater rigs willstop. The good news there will be a quicker rebound as the rest of the economycomes back quicker, the bad news is that it will ensure $300 oil in 2 years becausedrilling activity won't make it back in time.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Monday, December 01, 2008

Mark Steyn demonstrates how to totally destroy someone in a written debateas he responds to a journalism professor that accused him of a hate crime:

To end where we came in, M J Murphy wrote: “I think you owe Dr. Miller an apology.” Au contraire, I think “Dr Miller” owes me and Oriana an apology. Since he decided to go to such kinky lengths to catch my eye, he has accused me of failing to provide a source for a quote: False. He's accused me of making up famous rulings of the Ayatollah: False. He's declared flat out that there is no such thing as a Khomeini "Blue Book": False. And people pay money to study "responsible journalism" with this guy? At least for his own ill-advised adventures in fact-checking, his unfortunate acolyte, M J Murphy of Toronto, isn't charging cash.

If I were celebrated toilet photographer Warren Kinsella or leading Canadian Internet Nazi Lucy Warman, I’d sue. But I’m not. Nor, despite a flying visit to the Falklands and a couple of wet weekends in Wales, have I ever been attracted to sheep-shagging. But I imagine it feels a bit like dealing with Messrs Miller, Murphy and the Law R Cool kids: No matter how often you roger them senseless, they keep on bleating. I wouldn’t have bothered with this response were it not for the fact that Professor Waggy-Finger traduced not me but a great and courageous lady who is no longer here to laugh her magnificent scoffing laugh in his face. Oriana Fallaci is a hundred times the man John Miller is. Read her interviews with Arafat or the Shah and ask yourself whether she needs any posthumous lessons in “journalistic ethics” from an unread parochial poseur. And, if you are considering a career in journalism, think about what you'd like to be looking back on in 40 years' time: Oriana's resume or Professor Miller's.

The whipping that Mark Steyn delivers is almost painful to watch, like the scene from themovie Casino where the mobsters are beating Joe Pesci's brother to death. It'samazing that someone can take that beating and still go to work as a professor ofjournalism. Just go back to your farm, raise sheep but don't touch them. If youtouch them, look at the little blue book to know what to do.